OKFest 2014 will be the biggest Open Knowledge event yet. And with over a hundred sessions and 1000 participants, it promises to capture 360 view of the state of things in the open data movement. The engine room will be liveblogging the event, conducting flash interviews, surfing sessions for insights, and sitting down with a few open knowledge projects to learn more about the state of the art and evolution of the open data movement. We will be updating this space with pictures and other media, session aha’s, and trends we see throughout the event.

You probably work for “The Man.” If not you, then someone close to you does, and even if you have no friends or family, your government is almost certainly doing business with him. Wouldn't it be nice to know a bit more about the so-called “Man”? Thanks to the massive open data project OpenCorporates, you now can, and they are intensifying their data opening efforts with #FlashHacks, a crowdscraping campaign launched today. The campaign goal is to release 10 million data points on the companies you work for, work with, buy from, sell to, and deal with in tangible and intangible ways every day, and all in just 10 days.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced Wednesday that he was appointing Blue State Digital co-founder Jascha Franklin-Hodge as the city's new Chief Innovation Officer.
Franklin-Hodge, who has been running BSD's Boston office and has served as an advisor to Code for America, oversaw the technology tools that were central to the Obama campaigns, and prior to that ran the Howard Dean campaign's technology team. Read More

Currently, it is not possible for New Yorkers to easily sign up to track updates on City Council meetings and legislative activities. But in fact, there could be an easy fix for the problem that could help transform how members of the public engage with their government. That is what emerged from a #PDF14 workshop that illustrated how the realization of visions for open government in New York often comes down to wonky nuts and bolts issues related to government web platforms, procurement and access to open data. Read More

In a blog post earlier this week, Martin Tisne called the progress made by the Open Government Partnership “one of the best returns on investments we've had.” Bold words from the man who helped found the Open Government Partnership in 2011, and who now works as the Director of Policy for the Omidyar Network's Government Transparency initiative, which committed US$1,480,000 to the initiative in 2012.

How the NSA collects every phone call made in the Bahamas; why the FCC's proposed rulemaking on net neutrality is problematic; how Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to upgrade NYC's broadband; and much, much more. Read More

The European Parliament will be releasing result information from this upcoming weekend's EU parliamentary elections in open data format, it announced in a press release at the end of last week. Read More